Video meetings are the present and the future. With more companies across industries turning to virtual environments for team and client meetings, it’s essential to take every step possible to maximize the productivity of your video calls and conferences. 

The tech industry is responding to a rising trend of hybrid and remote work schedules, with many knowledge-based workers taking advantage of work-from-home opportunities. Software developers are releasing new tools and platforms to assist these workers in their endeavors. Avoma and Poised are two such technologies aimed at helping people get the most from their meetings. 

But when it comes to Avoma vs. Poised, which is the better solution? How do they differ, and which gives you the most pound-for-pound value?

Below, we’ll talk about these products in more detail:

What Is Avoma?     

Videoconferencing is the backbone of team productivity for many businesses, as remote and hybrid work has become the norm. But many teams have to use five or more applications to prepare, conduct, and analyze their meetings. Therefore, it's imperative for teams to streamline meeting workflows to minimize information lost among all the context switching.

Avoma was founded in 2017. It's essentially a comprehensive AI-powered meeting lifecycle assistant that automates vital tasks throughout the duration of a meeting. It helps teams prepare agendas, transcribes meetings, and provides a summary of notes. Avoma also offers coaching tips for all participants of the meeting.

The bread and butter of Avoma isare its AI-generated notes and collaboration capabilities, and users have reported a 30% improvement on average in their meeting outcomes thanks to the tool's insights. Avoma brands itself as an all-in-one tool for conversation intelligence, AI assistance, and meeting management. In other words, organizations can enjoy all of these functionalities without having to invest in three or four different solutions.

Avoma is all about collaboration for meetings, and it's intelligent enough to automate plenty of tasks out of the box while integrating with many of your existing technologies. It will even automate custom workflows. 

This solution can boost the efficiency of your team meetings and help you be more present in your interactions with clients, stakeholders, and coworkers. Its natural language processing (NLP) is more sophisticated and precise than many other tools on the market. Avoma has grown considerably over the past three years, much of which can be attributed to word of mouth and customer referrals.

Avoma’s Features

Perhaps what makes Avoma stand out the most is its meeting management capabilities. It provides a single location where you can prepare, collaborate, and look for all of your meetings.

Avoma allows you to produce and share meeting templates before assigning them automatically to your meetings, ensuring that none of the participants miss the key discussion topics.

The tool also comes with a collaborative note editor, allowing team members to write and edit notes in real-time. Your notes will be time-stamped and linked to the meeting recording for coworkers to listen to at a different date.

Avoma is also a meeting assistant thatwho automatically records meetings, no matter the web conference tools and dialers. It will record audio and video, and you can listen to all of your team's conversations.

Moreover, Avoma offers real-time transcription from all consenting participants, and the transcripts are surprisingly accurate, allowing for your team's conversations to be easily searchable through the platform. 

It also identifies each speaker and detects each topic in a meeting. This means you can analyze a speaker's talk-time, talk-to-listen ratio, and other characteristics. And you don't have to listen to entire conversations to pick up on their context because Avoma categorizes conversations into topics like “Next Steps,” “Pain Points,” and “Business Need.”

One aspect that clearly distinguishes Avoma from Poised is that it’s sales-focused. It helps teams to collaborate before, during, and following sales meetings and allows for employees at all levels to analyze and learn from customer-facing conversations.

For example, you can quickly share a snippet of a crucial moment of your meeting with a colleague by highlighting a portion of text from the conversation transcript. Avoma also allows anyone in an organization to search for specific mentions or phrases of all recorded meetings.

Can Avoma Make Meetings Simpler?

Avoma performs the primary functions of several different technologies, helping you manage meetings in a single platform. In that sense, it can make your meetings simpler and more productive. 

The AI-generated notes and collaborative note editor can help your team members stay on the same page and ensure no critical talking points are missed by colleagues — both present and absent from specific meetings.

Avoma also provides intelligence features to help you close more deals in sales meetings. And the topic detection and speaker identification features make it easy to stay in tune during meetings (and to learn from them afterward).

The Drawbacks of Using Avoma

Avoma has been criticized for not meeting as many business needs as competitors like Gong or Chorus. Reviewers have also critiqued it for being harder to use and coming with a higher learning curve. 

As far as Avoma vs. Poised is concerned, the former's conversation intelligence will not help you improve your communication skills to the same degree. Poised is singularly focused on communication during video meetings and presentations. While Avoma centers on sales, its concentration on team communication is minimal.

Does Avoma Really Make Your Team More Productive?    

Yes, if you learn how to use all of Avoma’s features, it can make your team more productive. The technology combines many features into one platform that can help your team members stay on the same page during sales meetings. And you can also listen back to recordings and read transcripts to highlight areas of strength and weakness. 

Considering that Avoma eliminates the need to purchase and manage four or five different meeting technologies, it can be worth the investment when it comes to improving team collaboration in a sales environment. 

What Is Poised?  

Poised is a software company founded in San Francisco in 2020. Its AI-powered communication platform is designed to make communication easier and more effective for workers across industries. 

Poised software provides real-time feedback during virtual meetings without anyone else knowing you’re using it. It measures energy, empathy, clarity, conciseness, confidence, and many other metrics and gives you tips for improving during your meetings. The communication coach also analyzes your performance across time and identifies trends of areas in which you are (and are not) improving. The glanceable recap after each meeting is especially useful as it shows you a bird’s-eye view of how effectively you communicated. 

Furthermore, Poised offers a personalized plan that compares your performance to that of some of the best communicators in your industry and provides in-meeting challenges that will help you strengthen areas of weakness. Poised users can also learn from articles, exercises, and videos from communication experts.

How Poised Makes You a Better Online Communicator

Poised is solely dedicated to helping people communicate more effectively. Online communication is the future, and being able to speak clearly and concisely, stay on topic, and address your audience respectfully and confidently will help you advance your career, whether you're in sales or any other industry. 

Poised is for executives, managers, employees, and anyone else who wants to communicate with more impact. Real-time feedback, trend analysis, and personalized plans can go a long way in helping you reach your goals.

Poised Features That Avoma Doesn’t Have

Because communication is the crux of Poised, it provides next-level conversation intelligence as compared to Avoma and other solutions. Professionals and leaders in many different roles are benefiting from Poised, from leadership to design, sales, marketing, and product management. 

Avoma’s communication coach is a minor feature and doesn’t offer as much communication-centered assistance as Poised does. For communication purposes, Avoma vs. Poised is no contest — Poised is the clear winner.

Poised vs. Avoma: Can You Use Both?

Yes, you can use both Poised and Avoma. With that said, you may want to control which features of the platforms you use at any given time. For example, if you become overwhelmed by both communication coaches running simultaneously, you may need to change your settings to select which features will activate when. 

If you’re aiming to speak more concisely, use fewer filler words, communicate more empathetically, and project genuine confidence, you’ll want to maximize Poised during meetings. If you want to analyze your sales meetings and strategize with your team on how to improve your pitches, Avoma is worth trying. 

Make Meetings Smoother With Poised

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of effective online communication. Whether you’re meeting with your entire team, individual team members, or clients, your meetings will be smoother and more successful if you know how to present yourself well and listen actively to the other participants. 

Poised is the solution for better communication. No matter what role or industry you fall under, you’ll start noticing significant improvements in your overall performance in no time. Don’t settle for subpar meetings anymore!

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Sources: 

Introduction To Natural Language Processing (NLP) Definition | Investopedia

What Is the Purpose of a Sales Meeting? | Chron

Remote Work Is Here To Stay And Will Increase Into 2023, Experts Say | Forbes